Humanists encourage discussion and the use of evidence and reason, not dogma, in solving problems. This means that humanists do not necessarily agree on everything. Articles on this web site and speakers at meetings do not necessarily represent anyone else's opinion.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) has voted strongly in favour of taking abortion out of criminal law right across the UK. Currently, under an 1861 law, if women have an abortion outside of circumstances that are legally permitted, they can face up to life imprisonment. In Britain, this means failing to comply […]

In a statement at the 36th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Humanists UK has joined various states in expressing concern at the growing marginalisation of religious, non-religious, and LGBT minorities in Indonesia. Despite having long accommodated a variety of different religion and belief communities, atheists are not legally recognised in […]

The leader of Lancashire County Council Geoff Driver has submitted a proposal to ban halal meat that has not been pre-stunned before slaughter from being served in the county’s schools, after it has been revealed that twenty-seven schools with a total of 12,000 pupils across the county are serving all pupils meat from suppliers where […]

Humanists UK has criticised the UK Government’s plans to end limits on religious discrimination in state school admissions during a speech at the 36th session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. The statement was made during a debate on the UNHRC’s universal periodic review of the UK, which took place in May […]

In a landmark ruling in the Court of Protection, life-prolonging care can be withdrawn from patients who are minimally conscious or in a permanent vegetative state if both the doctors and family agree that it is in their best interests, without the intervention of a court being required. Humanists UK welcomes this decision, which places […]

With the news replete with stories of humanists and freethinkers killed and persecuted for ‘blasphemy’ around the world, Alex Sinclair-Lack asks ‘How candid can I be about my beliefs’? All humanists must grapple with the question of when it is appropriate to tell people that you don’t believe in their god, and when, if ever, […]

Last week, the Archbishop of York criticised the National Trust and Cadbury for dropping the word ‘Easter’ from the name of their annual egg hunt. This prompted Prime Minister Theresa May to take time out of her visit to the Middle East to state: ‘I think the stance they have taken is absolutely ridiculous.’ Here […]

Heroes are not the stuff of myth: they keep us safe each and every day It’s normal when confronted by horrific events someplace in the world to feel a mixture of emotions. Grief, for the victims whose stories you have read about in the papers. Anger, for the fact that such a tragedy could be […]

Young Humanists is the section of the BHA specifically for humanists aged 18-35. It runs a regular Twitter debate once a month using the hashtag #YHDebate. March’s debate took the form of an ‘ask me anything’ (AMA) with Imtiaz Shams, a BHA trustee who is also the co-founder of Faith to Faithless, which provides support and […]

As a charity that operates within the field of religion and belief, the BHA’s work on education issues tends to be associated most with its campaigning on ‘faith’ schools and against the various freedoms to discriminate along religious lines that they enjoy. What we are less well-known for, perhaps, is our decades of campaigning around […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. Dearest Internet. I have found that the maxim “you just can’t win” holds up remarkably well. It turns out that by merely pointing out the fact that some person holds some opinion about some thing, one has therefore implicitly endorsed that opinion—on b […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. As a short, awkward, nerdy aspie with no interest in sports, there have been few American institutions that I feel more alienated by than the National Football League. The grandiose NFL logo and the iconography of its franchises have always been, to me […]

I recently acquired an old sarsaparilla bottle, its label stating that it was intended for medical treatment of such diseases as “chronic rheumatism,” “obstinate cutaneous eruptions,” and “syphilitic conditions.” It was to be used orally, not topically. Yes, this is the same sarsaparilla long used as an herbal tea and tonic that evolved into a health drink b […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. It’s safe to go to Brigham Young University now. They’re letting in Coke and Pepsi. At Wired, Michelle Dean has a big story on what is a surprising degree of drama and stress (financial, personal, political, etc.) behind the scenes at Snopes. In this s […]

As of this writing, Hurricane Maria continues to pound the Caribbean (and Puerto Rico specifically). As The New York Times reported, “Daybreak in Puerto Rico on Thursday exposed the crushing devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria - splintered homes, crumbled balconies, uprooted trees and floodwaters coursing through streets. The storm cut a path through the […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. Our boss, Robyn Blumner, is in Geneva for the 36th session of the UN Human Rights Council, and yesterday she delivered an excellent statement on the persecution of atheists in Malaysia. (Don’t let yourself be distracted by the incredibly orange and fea […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. The Earth continues to writhe. More than 200 people are killed in the devastation of a 7.1-magnitude earthquake across central Mexico. Joshua Partlow at the Washington Post reports: Marisela Avila Gomez, 58, was in her apartment in the capital’s cent […]

You may have heard the news—or at least the joke: there were more clowns than usual in the nation’s capital over the weekend. As Newsweek reported, “Among the thousands of protesters who took to the streets of Washington DC Saturday, some certainly did not look like your average demonstrators. Dressed in creepy clown garb and some sporting punk haircuts, app […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. Check out this fascinating presentation on the Gnostic gospels, given by the wicked-smart Cynthia Grzywinski, who also happens to be my mom. (And introduced with a poem read by my college acting professor, the wicked-awesome Pam Hendrick.) Neil deGrass […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. Kimberly Winston, reporting on an Annenberg study, writes an excellent and accurate lede for some ugly news. Emphasis mine: Nearly 1 in 5 Americans incorrectly believe that Muslim citizens don’t have the same First Amendment rights as other American ci […]

The British Humanist Association (BHA) and Young Humanists have published today a comprehensive guide for non-religious parents and young people, offering support and advice on how to navigate an education system increasingly subject to undue religious influence. The guide comes in the week that parents all over England discovered at which primary school their children have been offered a place for the next school year.

Religion in schools: a guide for non-religious parents and young people in England and Wales is free to download from the BHA’s website and aims to ensure that non-religious people are fully aware of their rights and the law as it relates to ‘faith’ schools and religion in schools more generally. The advice covers a range of areas, including Religious Education, Collective Worship, school admissions, and the teaching of Science, all of which can pose particular problems for non-religious families.

Currently, a third of state schools in England and Wales are ‘faith’ schools, meaningnon-religious parents in England and Wales have access to around 7,000 fewer appropriate schools, or nearly two million fewer places, than their religious counterparts. Depending on their type, these schools can religiously discriminate in their admission arrangements, employment policies, and delivery of the curriculum, all of which has a deleterious effect on the rights of non-religious parents. What is more, the law still requires schools without a religious character to hold daily acts of Christian worship, meaning that even parents who have specifically chosen to avoid ‘faith’ schools cannot completely escape religious proselytising.

Commenting on the publication of the new guide, BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson said, ‘Despite the fact that as a society we are now much more diverse, and much more non-religious, the school system has only become more and more permissive to religious influence in recent years. This guide builds on the decades of support that the BHA has provided to parents and young people caught in the crossfire of this long-standing tension between religion and education, and will hopefully equip them to challenge unlawful and discriminatory practice wherever they find it.’

Lauren Nicholas, coordinator of the BHA’s 18-35s section Young Humanists, added, ‘Well over two-thirds of young people in Britain state that they do not belong to any religion, and nearly half of the population as a whole now say they are non-religious. And yet, whether it’s being denied access to your local school, being forced to pray to a god you don’t believe in, or being taught a narrow and doctrinaire religious education curriculum, non-religious people have never encountered a more hostile education system than the one they face now. We are a maligned majority. Ultimately we must repeal the legal freedoms allowing religion to run amok in our schools, but until then this guide will do a great deal to protect the rights of parents.’

Young Humanists is the 18-35s section of the BHA. Two thirds of Britons between the ages of 18 and 35 are non-religious, according to surveys, and most will share humanist values even if that’s not a term they’ve come across. Young Humanists exists to offer a space for non-religious people aged 18-35 to meet, socialise, debate and support each other.

The British Humanist Association is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people who seek to live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity. It promotes a secular state and equal treatment in law and policy of everyone, regardless of religion or belief.

The research, which is based on data provided in the Government’s recent green paper on increasing selection in English schools, has found that Christian schools with a 100% religiously selective intake are less diverse and admit a far higher proportion of children classified as ‘of white origin’ than schools which operate under the 50% cap on religious selection or do not select on religious grounds at all.

The research has also shown that the existing 50% cap on religious discrimination in schools has been more effective in reducing racial segregation in non-Christian ‘faith’ schools than the Government has given it credit for. We continue to call on MPs to resist attempts at permitting further religious segregation. Please remember to write to your MP via our facility to voice your concerns about these worrying new proposals.

We shall be holding our next meeting on Thursday 16 June at 7.30 pm at the University Centre Shrewsbury, Guildhall, Frankwell Quay, Shrewsbury SY3 8HQ.

Did you know that 1.2 million state school places in England and Wales are subject to discriminatory religious admissions criteria? Did you know that these schools can prioritise not just those of a certain faith but also those of other faiths over those of no faith? And did you know that these admissions policies don’t just segregate schools religiously but also ethnically and socio-economically?

The BHA believes that the freedom to discriminate against pupils on the grounds of their parents’ religious or non-religious beliefs is both wrong in principle and incredibly damaging in practice. In this talk we will discuss the ways in which this kind of discrimination manifests itself in schools today, the impact that it has in an increasingly diverse society and an increasingly irreligious one, and the campaigns the BHA is running in order to bring about a more open, inclusive, and integrated education system.

Jay Harman is the British Humanist Association’s Faith Schools and Education Campaigner. He works on all the BHA’s education issues, from school admissions and discrimination in employment, to religious education, collective worship and evolution vs creationism in schools.

Jay is on the steering groups of the Accord Coalition for inclusive education and the Fair Admissions Campaign, and is a representative of the BHA at the Religious Education Council for England and Wales.

We’re very excited to announce Faith Schoolers Anonymous, a new project from our ‘Faith’ Schools Campaigner which helps pupils at ‘faith’ schools share their negative experiences with the world.

Too often, when we act on behalf of students at ‘faith’ schools of all kinds – be they private Muslim schools, unregistered Jewish schools, fundamentalist Christian academies, church schools, or whatever else – their real experiences are dismissed out of hand in favour of generic remarks about the supposed virtues of faith-based education.

For defenders of ‘faith’ schools, this can be an effective tactic when faced with truly heartbreaking and appalling consequences of sectarian education. But by allowing the proponents of ‘faith’ schools to shape public debate, we neglect the most important factor of all: the human rights and experiences of schoolchildren. Whether it’s children who have been reprimanded for having an inquiring mind, or condemned for their sexuality, or those denigrated for being a woman, or physically abused for getting distracted during all-day Torah study, their experiences should not be wantonly ignored.

Faith Schoolers Anonymous is here to break the silence. It aims to highlight the problems which ‘faith’ schools, by their very nature, help to foster, at the same time as exposing the spectacular failings of individual schools. You can support the site by reading and sharing stories at faithschoolersanonymous.uk, by submitting your own stories, and by sharing your experiences using the hashtag #faithschoolsanon.

Limits on who will be allowed to object to school admissions arrangements were proposed earlier this year by the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, who claimed that the move was designed to ‘stop vexatious complaints against faith schools by secularist campaign groups’. However, after over 60 questions were tabled in Parliament on the issue by MPs and peers from a range of parties, Schools Minister Lord Nash was forced to admit that the overwhelming majority (87%) of the BHA’s and FAC’s objections to the admission arrangements of religiously selective schools had been upheld.

Indeed, the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, to whom objections to school admission arrangements must be submitted, found at least one violation in every school that the investigation covered. These violations included schools directly discriminating on the basis of race and gender, failing to properly prioritise children in care, and unlawfully asking for information that they did not need, such as parents’ countries of origin, their medical history, or whether or not they spoke English as a second language.

Except for the Minister responding to the debate, Baroness Evans, every peer who contributed to the debate was critical of the Government’s proposals. Shadow Education Spokesperson Lord Watson described the ban as ‘a clear case of shoot the messenger rather than address the problem’, while All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group (APPHG) Secretary Baroness Massey labelled it as ‘counterproductive’ and ‘a nonsense’. Echoing these comments, Liberal Democrat Education Spokesperson Lord Storey commented that far from being ‘vexatious’, it was thanks to the BHA and FAC ‘that many wrongs have been righted’, and APPHG member Lord Desai added that the BHA’s work on admissions was ‘for the good of the education system’. Former APPHG Chair Lord Taverne also contributed, stating that ‘the complexity of some schools’ admissions policies seems designed to confuse and mislead.’

The BHA’s Campaign Manager Richy Thompson said, ‘The message in Parliament last night was clear. Schools that seek to bend admission rules to manipulate their intakes must be held to account. The report we published last year may be an inconvenient truth for the faith school sector, but the Department for Education’s decision to back the law breakers, punish the whistleblowers, and seemingly ignore the rights of children altogether, is nonsensical. We’re glad that those speaking in last night’s debate agree and we will continue to push not only for the ban to be reversed but also for a fairer and more transparent admissions system to be introduced.’

Notes

For further comment or information please contact the BHA’s Faith Schools Campaigner Jay Harman on jay@humanism.org.uk or 020 7324 3078

The Fair Admissions Campaign wants all state-funded schools in England and Wales to be open equally to all children, without regard to religion or belief. The Campaign is supported by a wide coalition of individuals and national and local organisations. We hold diverse views on whether or not the state should fund faith schools. But we all believe that faith-based discrimination in access to schools that are funded by the taxpayer is wrong in principle and a cause of religious, ethnic, and socio-economic segregation, all of which are harmful to community cohesion. It is time it stopped.

Note: Jay Harman of the BHA will be talking to Shropshire Humanist Group about faith schools on 16 June. All concerned are welcome.

A pupil in Telford has been told that he cannot ride a council-run bus to school along with his classmates because ‘he’s not Catholic’, it has been reported. The bus serves the Holy Trinity Academy in Priorslee, which was opened in 2015 jointly by the local Roman Catholic and Anglican dioceses, and despite the bus being operated by Telford and Wrekin Council, it is not open to children at the school who are either not religious or belong to a minority religion. The British Humanist Association (BHA) has once again called on the exemptions in the Equality Act 2010 allowing for discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief in the provision of school transport to be scrapped.

Speaking about the situation, the father of the boy involved stated that the ‘the bus stops two minutes from the front door’, ‘but he was told that because he’s not Catholic, even though he goes to the school, he can’t use it’. A spokesperson for Telford and Wrekin Council said ‘Transport assistance is offered to pupils who are baptised Catholics and pupils whose families are faithful and regular worshippers in a Church of England Parish Church or other Christian affiliated churches if they live over the three-mile distance criteria for secondary aged pupils.’

Remarkably, discrimination of this kind is entirely legal, as the provision of school transport by local authorities is exempted from equalities legislation. The BHA has previously raised concerns about this exemption with the Department for Education, stating in their response to a 2014 consultation on the issue that ‘Providing one group of parents extra choice over others is unfair, and the nature of the discretionary spending likely causes religious and ethnic segregation’.

The BHA’s Faith Schools Campaigner Jay Harman said, ‘Discretionary transport for children attending “faith” schools is unfair, discriminatory, and also completely unnecessary. Religious families are already given greater choice of schools than non-religious families as a result of the religious discrimination permitted in school admissions, and this is only exacerbated by the provision of free transport for the religious. On top of that, all the evidence tells us that very few parents actually send their children to a “faith” school for reasons of religion, so this kind of provision is entirely unnecessary too.

‘Ultimately, of course, we do not think it is appropriate for any state body to provide funding for a service which incentivises parents to avoid inclusive and integrated schools in favour of discriminatory and divisive schools. This will only serve to entrench religious segregation in our education system, and we would encourage any council providing free transport to do so in a fair and non-discriminatory way.’

For further comment or information please contact the BHA’s Faith Schools Campaigner on jay@humanism.org.uk or 0207 324 3078.